The Battle for Wesnoth 1.12

November 2014. As the year comes to an end, a new stable release series begins.
The development team is proud to present version 1.12 of The Battle for Wesnoth!
This release features many improvements in all areas, including a completely revamped interface, a new multiplayer faction, dozens of new portraits, updated unit animations, hundreds of bug fixes, and a vastly improved map editor. Try out the new features for yourself, or read on for more details...

What’s New in Wesnoth 1.12

The improvements for this release begin at the title screen, featuring the familiar map of Wesnoth and its surroundings in a new visually-appealing style. Starting a new game — be it in single or multiplayer mode — reveals a completely refurnished game screen, with a more streamlined and modern design. As part of our commitment to elegance and consistency, every dialog in the game features the new design and many other subtle enhancements.

For Players

The minimap now offers alternative display modes for situations where a more fine-grained visualization of units, terrains, and villages is desired. Many sidebar elements have been rearranged and rescaled according to the current screen resolution in order to make better use of available space, and the team flag and number for the selected unit are displayed for ease of access. Leaders and designated hero units in campaigns and multiplayer scenarios are also adorned with star-shaped ellipses for fast identification on the field.

Because Wesnoth thrives on the diversity and ingenuity of add-on content, this time the Add-ons Manager packs long overdue additions, such as displaying each add-on’s installation status directly on the list, filtering items by their type or status, and enabling authors to link to feedback topics hosted on our official forum board.

Units with specialized variations like the Walking Corpse and Soulless now have subsections in the built-in help system dedicated to documenting each variation in full. New top categories have been added as well, introducing the different types of add-ons to newcomers, and providing an overview for each multiplayer faction.

Many art improvements have been made to the game’s mounted units, including the Horseman, Cavalryman, and Elvish Scout unit lines. The Dwarvish Fighter and Thunderer lines and the undead Spectre and Skeleton units have had their animations revamped in full. Several generic portraits were added or updated as well: the Spearman, Ogre, Wose, Ancient Lich, Wraith, and some troll units, amongst others.

Campaigns

A number of additional portrait variations have been added to Wesnoth’s flagship campaign, Heir to the Throne, as well as a brand new set of portrait art for Eastern Invasion.

To complement the new title screen artwork, all campaign journey maps featured in story screens have been redrawn in the same style, and new ones have been added to several campaigns that previously lacked one.

Most mainline campaigns have also received various visual and gameplay improvements. Most notably, Son of the Black Eye has been rebalanced in its entirety, bringing its difficulty in line with its designation as an expert level campaign. Many scenarios of Eastern Invasion have seen significant improvements, with some having been completely redesigned from the ground up.

Although all campaigns in the menu are labeled according to their difficulty level, it is not uncommon for players to underestimate the challenge and face unsurmountable obstacles midway through. For this reason, a new option has been added to the Load Game dialog allowing players to switch difficulty at the very start of a scenario.

Multiplayer

This series sees the introduction of a new playable faction in multiplayer games, the Khalifate. Available in game setup to use via the “Default + Khalifate” era, this faction of humans lacks magic users, and instead specializes in using terrain features to coordinate attacks at dawn or dusk. Their ranks boast lawful and liminal units, healers, high-accuracy melee fighters, and fearsome horse-mounted archers. While Khalifate units tend to be more expensive than those of the Loyalist faction, they make up for this with high mobility — especially on hilly terrains.

A new kind of add-on, multiplayer modifications, has been implemented. Modifications are capable of changing the game rules independently of the selected era or map. Thus, add-on creators can design scripts that improve and alter the gameplay without restricting those improvements to a certain era or map. The default installation does not feature any modifications, but you can already download a few from the add-ons server.

Multiplayer game creation has been redesigned and split into two screens. The first is responsible for game creation and selection of era and modifications, while the second allows for additional configuration. New functionality to allow user-made add-ons to display custom configuration options on the latter screen has been added. In addition, all multiplayer screens were improved to take the new changes to multiplayer campaigns into account and increase the visibility of relevant information, as well as adjusted to improve support for low-resolution devices.

Many bugs related to reloading multiplayer campaigns and scenarios have been fixed. Support for the [campaign] tag has been added to multiplayer mode, thus allowing the same campaign to be played in both multiplayer and singleplayer. As a result of this, difficulty levels and other features of singleplayer campaigns are supported in multiplayer as well. Multiplayer campaigns also support new functionality, including returning to the lobby between scenarios and performing side configurations. Finally, the Legend of Wesmere campaign has been made available as the first multiplayer-ready campaign shipping with the game.

Several other features have been added to enhance the multiplayer experience. An audible bell has been added to the game setup screen to notify the host once all players have finished selecting a faction. A sound is also played when the game has begun. If players disconnect from the game, an option to assign their side to ‘idle’ without revealing their vision to the game host is now available, as well as a ‘blindfolded join’ option so that players may rejoin the game and be assigned to a side without getting the vision of a normal observer.

General

Just as the game engine’s extensibility allows our community to create and publish their own original content, it also allows players to change options as they see fit. The Hotkeys Preferences dialog has been renewed with a categorized view, the ability to assign multiple sequences to a particular action, and change assignments to make use of additional buttons found in certain mouse models.

Very often, players require direct access to the game files to share their saves, create or modify add-ons, or take screenshots of their games or map creations. As the game runs on multiple platforms and accepts a vast number of installation alternatives, a reliable and consistent mechanism to provide players with access to their stored data has been added to the Preferences dialog. In addition to this, new options are now available to manage newly created screenshots: players will be able to immediately open them in their preferred image viewer, or browse the full contents of their screenshots folder.

The UI theme selection dialog now includes a short description of each item. A new optional theme optimized for the Pandora and other small resolution devices has been added as well, providing a more compact visualization of unit stats and more visible command buttons.

Two new translations have been started: Scottish Gaelic and Ukrainian. As always, The Battle for Wesnoth relies on volunteers for translating the game. Anyone interested should refer to the Contribute section below for details.

For Content Creators

Like the main game interface, the map editor was also given a major overhaul, bringing with it increased visibility for commonly used file and selection tools and more easily identifiable action icons. This version also marks the debut of the experimental scenario mode, which enables additional features previously available only to WML coders. Note that there are still many aspects remaining to be finalized and polished before it can be considered a substitute for the targeted subset of WML.

On the terrain selection front, tropical forests were completely redrawn and expanded with several variations, including rainforest, sparse and dense palm forests, and savanna. Underground maps also benefit from the addition of new bridge types, and battle scenarios may be spiced up with two new trash and debris terrains available directly from the editor.

Both players and WML authors will benefit from improved debugging tools. Loading-stage error reports are now far more legible and feature copy-to-clipboard functionality. The Gamestate Inspector tool received similar updates: in addition to a copy-to-clipboard option for game variables and status information, it now also makes use of the same underlying code as saved games to correctly generate valid multiline WML attributes and translatable strings.

To further assist WML authors, GUI.pyw, a graphical interface for the three main WML maintenance scripts (wmllint, wmlindent, and wmlscope) has been included, providing a convenient alternative to the command line versions. The tool may be found in the data/tools folder. More information on the maintenance tools can be found on the wiki.

On the back-end side, this new stable series contains a vast array of additions for content creators. Micro AIs provide a powerful framework for assigning new and specialized AI behaviors to sides with minimal coding effort. Other AI improvements include a vastly improved and entirely configurable AI recruitment engine, and a new AI for use in multiplayer games.

Many other new features have been added to the WML and Lua API. For instance, animation WML tags support a new, more compact syntax for defining animation frames in less space. The API has also received several changes which content creators porting 1.10-based add-ons must adapt to: a list is provided in our dedicated forum topic.

Download

The Battle for Wesnoth is made available under the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL). The source code is available from wesnoth.org, where you can also find instructions for building from source on a range of different operating systems. Ready-to-go packages are also available for most popular operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Apple OS X, and GNU/Linux.

You can refer to the downloads page for the latest up-to-date packages and instructions, including those for other platforms once they become available.

If you downloaded previous versions of the game, you might be interested in downloading the Xdelta files only.

Contribute

Since its inception in July 2003, The Battle for Wesnoth is constantly being improved and expanded upon by hundreds of international volunteers from diverse backgrounds. Contributions range from mainline content shipped as part of the official game releases to hundreds of user-made projects available to download from our add-ons server, directly from the title screen. Whether you need help beating a particular scenario or adding a feature to your custom maps, Wesnoth boasts a massive community of players and creators always willing to help.

Besides creating your own add-on content, there are many other ways you can help Wesnoth: